Celebrity Guest Editorial: NYFA’s Zeke Iddon!

So a couple weeks ago I’m minding my own business when the email dings – it’s a rep from the New York Film Academy’s School of Game Design, asking about the possibility of one of their people doing a guest piece. Technically it was from their marketing department, which always makes me suspicious since I get about eleventy-five of those a week and eleventy-four of them wind up trying to sell me Cialis™, which I’m told is for Whenever the Time is Right®. Every now and then I bite though, which in this case was a great thing since it turned out to be both legit and totally worth it.

Thus do I introduce Iron Man Mode Blog Overlord, freelance writer, Guitar Hero master, and NYFA staffer Zeke Iddon, who for reasons soon to become clear is slightly less than overjoyed to share with us his feelings on Tale of Tale’s latest nongame Bientôt l’été, which I just know is going to mess up the site’s text display. Despite the pain, he even made us a video. You gotta watch the video, it’s freaking awesome.

Take it Zeke!

— S

Bientôt l’été – Indie or Just Ennui?

By Zeke Iddon, New York Film Academy

As is convention for most, I usually try to discuss a game objectively before giving my subjective summary of it at the end of the review. But as a disclosure of interests, I admit that slight biases sneak in whenever I’m writing up small indie games, or at the very least I try to give them a few more concessions than I would an AAA title.

So that’s what I planned to do here with a little indie arthouse game called Bientôt l’été, but unfortunately I learned very early on that the title translates loosely as ‘A Steaming Pile of…’

… no, hold up. Let’s do this properly.

The Premise

Bientôt l’été is an arthouse game by Belgian developers Tale of Tales, probably most recognizable for their 2009 game The Path.

The game, which is currently priced at $10 on Steam, starts off by putting you control of a nameless protagonist on a surreal shoreline. Your primary goal – while walking up and down the shoreline – is to try to avoid thinking about all the other things you could have spent that $10 on.

Gahh, sorry. I tried, but I just couldn’t keep it up.

I promise this post isn’t an exercise in spleen-venting just for entertainment’s sake and I will get onto dissecting what little gameplay Bientôt l’été has to offer. In fact, I really wish I could be nice to the game but there are two very unforgivable issues here.

Firstly, we’ve all been treated to some fantastic art games recently, so much so that it has put the arthouse genre back in vogue. Proteus lit our fires, Journey got us hot under the collar and Dear Esther… was… er, lovely.

That Bientôt l’été is a such a disappointing experience isn’t so much a personal gripe, more that it’s a kick in the teeth for a genre already suffering from dental cavities; anyone who is just recently coming round to the idea of art games could be turned back by an experience like Bientôt l’été. For critics of the art game genre, the thing is just pure ammunition.

But the main issue is that there’s a massive disparity between what the game is trying to be, and what it ultimately is…

So Art-House it Hurts. Badly.

According to the Tale of Tales website, the subtext behind Bientôt l’été (which isn’t actually expressed within the game itself) is that you’re a lonely astronaut using a holodeck to interact with a lover separated by vast space and time. Within this digital world, you’re treated to an idyllic stroll across a visually stunning beach. As the waves roll in, cryptic messages from your lover fill the screen. The only thing you can interact with in any real sense is a small house – walking into it, you get to play chess with your lover, smoke cigarettes, drink wine and exchange the cryptic messages you learned on the beach.

That’s the idea, anyway. In reality, there’s nothing to do on the beach, the “chess” games are entirely nonsensical and nothing is ever revealed (or built upon) through the melodramatic phrases which pop up at random. You walk away from the chess games having no idea what you’re supposed to achieve, leave the house and step onto the empty beach again. You quickly remember that there’s nothing to do out there.

And that’s it.

That Cannot Be It

I’m afraid it is.

There really isn’t much more to discuss in terms of the gameplay, but I appreciate that might be a bit frustrating for you reading this as it was for me playing it. If you’d really like to see it in action, I uploaded a gameplay video partly for this review. As it was my first ever time playing the game, it’s painful to look back on how excited I was to get into it. I get to rage-quitting point in record time:

There are probably a few people who would accuse me of not spending enough time exploring the game. I would refer to such people as ‘probably mental’, but at the same time I imagine that there are tiny nuggets of symbolism and meaning to be found within Bientôt l’été. Unfortunately, I’m not willing to walk at a snail’s pace across a mile-long beach to find them.

The work/reward ratio just isn’t there, to such an extent that it makes you wonder if the developers have ever played a normal game for reference. I’ve had the honor and pleasure to work with a certain game design school over the last few months, and wasn’t surprised to learn that one of the first things they teach is how to challenge a player without generating unbearable frustration. So even on a very fundamental level, Bientôt l’été fails.

Credit where It’s Due

It’s a fairly good-looking game. Although… nope, I even retract that.

It’s fine on a surface level, but its veneer of beauty is undermined somewhat by dated textures and odd instances of polygon clipping. In addition, I actually wonder how beautiful it would really be if it weren’t for the filters that seem to have been lazily thrown onto it in post production.

Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t expecting Bioshock Infinite, but these are not good observations to have about a game whose strongest card is supposed to be aesthetics.

Another design-related face-palm is delivered less than a minute into play. Apparently the phrases which pop up on the beach are of great significance so it’s important (for reasons never revealed) to pay attention to them. If you can read this white-on-white text, you’re a better man than I:

But hey, at least the music’s relaxing?

The Red Flag at the Beginning

From the off, the game itself warns players that Bientôt l’été should not be played to be won – it’s an exploration experience in which soaking up the atmosphere is the only real aim. That’s fine, and I get that. The aforementioned Proteus instantly springs to mind when you see the preface, and that was utterly marvellous.

Same with Journey and Dear Esther. But the difference is, none of those other games take great pains to point this out to you. Bientôt l’été, on the other hand, wields the preface like some kind of shield:“I know there’s no content here. I said that. If you don’t enjoy it, it’s your fault.”

And that’s what really grated on me. I spent a long time walking around feeling rather stupid that I wasn’t ‘getting’ it. This was followed pretty quickly by extreme annoyance at the realization that there was nothing to ‘get’. I know Tale of Tales’ work isn’t for everybody, but this probably isn’t for anybody.

While Proteus had more sides to it than a Coke can, Bientôt l’été is painfully one-dimensional and harkens back not to Tale of Tales’ great title The Path, but more towards their very early work…

…They originally made screensavers.

About Zeke

Zeke Iddon is a professional writer whose gaming experience goes back as far as his debilitating phobia of owls, which he doesn’t like to talk about. He grew up in the freezing wastelands of northern Tamriel, otherwise known as ‘England’, and had his future (including popularity at school) forever shaped by the fact that his father ran a video game import business.

Since these humble beginnings and the completion of his writing BA degree , Zeke has skyrocketed to such lofty heights as ‘running a charity game blog‘, as well as earning a place in the Guinness Book of Records in 2010 for playing Guitar Hero for over 24-hours straight. While he continues to game for charity frequently, he works in a professional capacity for the New York Film Academy’sgame design school where he proudly serves as a lead consultant and writer.

If we’re lucky and well-behaved Zeke might hang out and respond to questions or comments. Or possibly gentle sympathy. Thanks for the piece, good sir!

24 Responses to Celebrity Guest Editorial: NYFA’s Zeke Iddon!

Wow Matt, thanks so much for the great introduction and kind words. Particularly such words as ‘celebrity’ and ‘overlord’, which I feel are a little misplaced but deeply appreciated nonetheless!

“If we’re lucky and well-behaved Zeke might hang out and respond to questions or comments.”

Indeed, as long as nobody makes any loud and sudden noises I’ll be happy to respond to any comments left here. In particular, I’d love to hear from anyone who has a good indie/art game recommendation – the experience above hasn’t totally crushed my spirit, so drop some suggestions below guys.

Thank you for the great article, Zeke, and a video that had me laughing out loud. Like AJ, I’ve never been a great fan of Tale of Tales. The Path had something going for it, to be sure, but even that one only held me for two of the girls’ journeys. Our own Scout was a fan, the link I made to your first mention is to his review.

As to art games, I was thrilled to see us on the same wavelength with Journey – it’s brilliant. As to recommendations for ones that are actually also games, yeah, there’s a studio you can’t go wrong with… a Russian outfit called Ice-Pick Lodge.

Another rather disappointed Tale of Tales wannabe fan. I endured with The Path for quite a while but that game is designed to frustrate and makes its mechanics so obscure anyway that it’s painful to learn to play it and then also painful to go ahead and play it through. I appreciate the ideas, of course, but, yeah, it’s never good to feel so frustrated with a piece of interactive software that you feel it is designed to prevent you ever learning how to use it efficiently. Even Metal Gear Solid 2 did not do that.

By what I gather here, Bientôt l’été is less frustrating in mechanical terms (although that white on white text, yes, they are fucking with us) but it suffers from a bad case of complete lack of winning condition or end state – and that grates. Proteus had you have meaningful interaction with the island, Journey had a definitive winning condition and even Slave of God made you look like you’re doing something with a purpose. I’ll sample Bientôt l’été when I run into a massive discount on Steam, but I melieve I’ll give it little time.

Good writing, mr. Zeke!!!!!!

Marcus Sakey04/30/2013

In the immortal words of the civilians in one of those shooter zombie games, “Thank you for saving me!”

That game looks truly awful. And yet pretty enough and ambitious enough that I could easily see myself plunking down the $10 on a soon-to-be-regretted whim.

The video, however, was brilliant:

“I love you.”
“I have mixed feelings about you at best.”

Well done, sir.

Of the games you mentioned, I’ve bought but not played several, though one day Dear Esther will gave its day in court. But I did buy The Void on Steerpike’s recommendation, and despite the general lack of explanation and the rather staggering initial difficulty, I loved it. Not “loved” in the played it often sense, I’m afraid, but definitely in the sense that it stuck with me, hauntingly so. I often found myself thinking of it as I drifted off at night.

Which seems to me a reasonable goal for an art game. Sure, ideally it would also be breathtakingly entertaining, but if it least gets under your skin, if it makes you think, or returns to you at unexpected moments, that strikes me as a victory.

Ajax1904/30/2013

Tale of Tales is a Belgian company you say? Well, having lived in Beglium for three years, color me not surprised at the quality of this game! (Beer, chocolate, steak, frites, and waffles… After that, anything coming from Belgium is inherently dodgy.)

I totally appreciate this review. I need something like this. In my 34+ years of video game playing, I don’t think I’ve ever played an “art house” game. I feel like I should, since I like “art house” movies. I do believe that I should give games like this a try, you know, branch out from my normal diet of Mass Effect, Dragons Age, Civilization, XCom, etc.

That said, I am also the type of person that if I were to try an “art house” game and it sucked, like this one, I would swear them off forever and just simply refer back to this nonsense (ad infinitum) in support of my strong anti-art house game stance.

Thank you for saving me from me.

Also, I hate subtitles that you can’t read because they are the same color as the background.

So, out of Journey, Dear Esther, Proteus, which is the most accessible for someone trying to breach the “art house” barrier for the first time?

Journey is the most soul-eviscerating. Every Game of the Year award that The Walking Dead didn’t get, Journey got – including the most coveted of all, Steerpike’s award. You could give that PS3 of yours a workout.

Proteus is the most sweet-natured. I think it’s best to play if you’ve got children, or are near children. See what Harbour Master did to understand what I mean.

Dear Esther is the most art-house. In the sense that it’s the most un-gamelike, and I’d say the most divisive in terms of whether it affected you. I liked it, but I understand, and even agree with, those who didn’t.

Every Day the Same Dream is the most horrifying. Gregg wrote about it years ago, bringing it to my attention, and I still think about it sometimes. Something about that jangling music juxtaposed with the game itself.

Ironically, Tale of Tales semi-mocked Every Day the Same Dream, calling it largely unbelievable because “no one lives that way.”

Which I think goes to tell you something about the Tale of Tales.

Tale of Tales has stated a couple of times that their objective is to make games that aren’t fun. While I can appreciate that goal under certain circumstances (Schindler’s List is not fun; that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been made, or shouldn’t be watched), I disapprove of their application of it – namely, that their whole “thing” is to make games that aren’t fun. That’s it. It’s almost like they’re trying to prove a point that nobody wants or needs proven.

The Path was definitely interesting, but for the same price you could get Journey, or Proteus. Other Tale of Tales games (that they have charged cash money for) include one in which you play an old woman walking around a graveyard. You can choose to sit on a bench, or not. (that’s it). Another is nothing but a box with objects in it. (that’s it).

Art is great if it’s art; if it’s Belgians being difficult, it’s not that valuable. I got about a million times more entertainment from Zeke’s video than I ever have from a Tale of Tales game.

Just played Every Day the Same Dream… wow! I think that’s going to stay with me for a long time. Classic example of achieving the exact objective (and emotional response) the developer was aiming for.

“Tale of Tales has stated a couple of times that their objective is to make games that aren’t fun.”

Well, I guess they exceded their aims too.

I learned after playing that the game is supposed to be a personal love letter between the two lead ToT developers, which explains a fair bit. Probably should have been left as a personal exchange IMHO.

“So, out of Journey, Dear Esther, Proteus, which is the most accessible for someone trying to breach the “art house” barrier for the first time?”

I’m pretty much with Steerpike on this one. Journey is probably the most universally enjoyable and the most fulfilling out of the three. I loved Dear Esther but I can fully understand why others don’t, and why it raised a furore over the ‘is it really a game’ issue.

Proteus was charming and deeply enjoyable. Only problem is it’s a bit pricey given that you’ll only get an hour out of it, but it’s a lovely hour! I hadn’t thought about how much fun it’d be to play Proteus with kids, either. That’d be sweet.

I see there’s a minimalist-style puzzle game currently doing the rounds called Kairo. Looks really neat, although I’ve only watched a quick Let’s Play on Youtube. It’s on Steam for a few bucks so I might get it when I’m next on a spending spree.

“That said, I am also the type of person that if I were to try an “art house” game and it sucked, like this one, I would swear them off forever and just simply refer back to this nonsense (ad infinitum) in support of my strong anti-art house game stance.”

That’s what really pisses me off about Tale of Tales. It’s one of the easiest genres to tar with one brush, and the one which least deserves it. I guess when it comes to ‘art house’ games, just judge them on their individual merits.

“Art is great if it’s art; if it’s Belgians being difficult, it’s not that valuable.”

As true in the arts as it is in life, I feel.

matt w05/01/2013

“Other Tale of Tales games (that they have charged cash money for) include one in which you play an old woman walking around a graveyard. You can choose to sit on a bench, or not. (that’s it).”

In their defense, this describes the version that you don’t pay cash money for. You only have to pay cash if you want to unlock the chance that she’ll die when she’s done sitting on the bench.

Indie/art games: Man, there are tons. I don’t play AAA games so I might not be the best person to ask, but one nice thing about them is that sometimes they’re really short, and free. Small Worlds is a fantastic little fifteen-minute game, and if you want a fuck-you-this-isn’t-a-game experience of the sort Tale of Tales seems to promise I love Walk or Die. (You press the space key. The game is over when you let go of it. I’ve played it for twenty minutes at a time.) Most indie/art games aren’t like that, though.

And there’s lots of other stuff. I love NightSky and most of Jake Elliott’s stuff (haven’t picked up Kentucky Route Zero yet). These are the less gamey end; there’s lots of gamier indie stuff (some of which is very arty too, see Braid), and just tons of stuff in general. The other commenters here who are real gamers can tell you more and I guess have.

Kairo! Yes, that sounds darkly fascinating. Once again Harbour Master over at Electron Dance has a brilliant writeup on it (includes spoilers. Everything HM writes is worth reading). I’ve wanted to grab it on Steam but I just have so much to play right now.

We’ve also not discussed the work of Jason Rohrer, which has also been sort of divisive. Showing how even well-meaning liberals can miss the boat, I’d completely missed a significant shortcoming in Passage until our own AJ wrote about it, making me slap my forehead and wonder what was wrong with me. I’ve only played a few of Rohrer’s games, and in some ways I think he still hasn’t climbed his Everest yet.

Speaking personally, I’m much better at (and much prefer) finding the art and meaning in slightly more traditional games – STALKER, for example, is ultimately about man’s relationship with God, but you get a fun game in there too. Mass Effect is a polemic against racism. Painkiller gives you a whole entire complete awesome game before you hit that last level.

As Zeke says, it’s easy to mock the art-house style because it is often intentionally dense or vague, or open to interpretation, or just plain weird. And that’s why I see Tale of Tales as hurting their own efforts, because it almost feels like they’re trying to mock art-house games. What good does that do?

@Matt W – too right dude, too right. For free you can walk around the graveyard. And sit on the bench. For five bucks you unlock the watch-her-keel option.

Art House games don’t really exist, as it is pretty impossible to draw direct parallels with movie industry. But, speaking of recommendations for Ajax, if he hasn’t sampled Limbo, that is a good start. It’s a proper game, with good, solid mechanics and clear goals and stuff but very arty in its art direction and symbolism.

The Void and Pathologic by Ice Pick Lodge are great recommendations and on the other side of the spectrum, in the land of hardcore indie, awaits: Today I Die.

@Meho – Indeed, Limbo is a cracking recommendation. I think I neglected to mention it because I think of it as a more conventional platformer, but you’re right in that it’s very arty in it’s aesthetics. And a little bit terrifying, too.

I got stuck very early on Limbo. Very early… floating box in a small pond. If I recall, Ajax was present and I believe he might have sworn off Limbo forever on account of that scene. He really does do that, I’ve observed it. Honestly I’m lucky he still speaks to me, given my behavior most of the time.

What’s the definition of art-house? When does something stop being an art-house game and become a more conventional game with a strong artistic bent? I perceive a big experiential difference between, say, Today I Die and From Dust, but is it overcategorization to separate them?

I would say they are very much separated. Art House and commercial cinema are not separate by their aesthetics and artistic intentions only, the difference in production realities is important part of their identity. Therefore, Chachi’s game, modest as it is compared to AAA monsters is still world away from Today I Die.

On the other hand, Today I Die and, let’s say Lone Survivor are obviously closer in this regard yet do they actually belong into the same category? Does Limbo?

Max "xtal" Boone05/03/2013

This is disappointing, to learn that Tale of Tales have made such a terrible game. The Path wasn’t great by any means but it was at least semi-substantial in terms of things to discover, for a game of its modest size anyway. And, you know, there was some intrigue and story with the six girls. Whereas this…this is a “game” about..two people’s inside joke? Riveting.

Also: yes, Journey and Limbo are very good places to start, though I wouldn’t even refer to them as “art house” or “arty” because they’re very game-y games still. The best “fancy pants” game for the “thinking fellow” (lolwut?) of recent memory is Braid, if you ask me. And that’s pretty damn game-y too. Games are alright. (Sorry everyone who doesn’t think “alright” should be a word…)

I was recently reading Ice-Pick Lodge’s manifesto on “Deep Games” – which is badly translated but perfectly understandable. It makes some strong points about the experience of games as art and what the objective of the artist might be, without implying that every game needs to be like that.

Personally I don’t think that a game-y game automatically disqualifies itself from being art-house. That would be feeding right into Tale of Tales’ hands – they want to make games with no game in there, and then say “WE DID ART.” Games are games first. That doesn’t mean they have to be fun, but it does require certain things. For some reason I’ve never been a huge fan of Sid Meier’s definition of game as “a series of interesting choices,” even though it’s essentially perfect, summing everything up very well without exclusion or inclusion. From that perspective Bientôt l’été fails as a game because it’s not a series of interesting choices. It is – at MOST – a series of choices. Judging from Zeke’s experience, one of those choices is whether or not to drive a pencil into your eye to put an end to it.

Things are usually considered to have artistic merit when they make a statement of some sort, or have a message, or when they evoke reaction in the consumer, or when the creator’s objective is to generate emotion through oblique means. In cinema, I think we casually define “art house” as artsy material that’s especially niche, or maybe intentionally obtuse or difficult to interpret. Meho’s point that it’s more than just aesthetics and message… I hadn’t thought about that. Is it true that to qualify as “art-house” something needs to have less budget? History says that’s been the case. Even if it’s not production realities, something beyond content must distinguish them, since there’s no consistency in the content; it can be funny, gory, scary, serious, upside-down, etc etc etc. Reservoir Dogs was shown in art-house theatres alongside… uh… alongside other movies that were more traditionally artsy content-wise.

One certain thing is that Bientôt l’été tries too hard – probably on purpose – and winds up being irritating rather than contributory.

matt w05/03/2013

Games are games first. That doesn’t mean they have to be fun, but it does require certain things. For some reason I’ve never been a huge fan of Sid Meier’s definition of game as “a series of interesting choices,” even though it’s essentially perfect, summing everything up very well without exclusion or inclusion.

I’m going to a fume for a little bit and then drop a link to this post by Laura Michet, which says it better than I could. Well, not that I’m saying YOU CAN’T HANDLE THIS KIND OF GAME because I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, but something that is “made by a game developer (and a musician), working in the context of videogames, using game design and development techniques to express a particular set of things” can be worthwhile, even if it doesn’t have certain things. Or even if it’s not a game first, in whatever sense we’re talking about.

The contrast I’m talking about here is not “arthouse vs. mainstream” I think but between games that challenge you to beat them or to do well at them and games that don’t. LIMBO challenges you, Braid challenges you, NightSky challenges you even if it doesn’t challenge you on every level and many of the challenges are meant to be in normal mode. Thirty Flights of Loving doesn’t want you to get stuck before you finish it. Neither does Photopia. Gravity Bone I’m not sure, I got stuck but I think that might be because I’m not the target audience, and I had a similar experience with something called In Ruins which is about exploring a procedurally generated landscape except there’s one (guaranteed) jump that took me forever to make and I don’t think getting stuck there was part of the intended experience.

Small Worlds has a bit of challenge I guess, except the experience of trying to make a jump certainly isn’t the point. (In lots of cases whether you actually get challenged depends on you more than the game; my sister-in-law had to get me to finish You Have To Burn The Rope for her. And she even plays games.) And it sounds like Tale of Tales doesn’t challenge you that way, and Walk or Die which I linked doesn’t, and it’s questionable whether Passage does (there is challenge in obtaining a high score, but I don’t think one single solitary person who played it ever cared about getting a high score). But these all work within the content of videogames and use game design and development techniques to express particular things, and I don’t think they’re invalid for that reason. (Some of them may be invalid because of crappiness.) So I’m interested in that side of the contrast, which I guess the ToT folk and Jordan Magnuson among some others call “notgames,” and I think they don’t have to be bad or pointless even if Bientot l’Ete is.

(Also the IGN review suggests that Bientot l’Ete basically only works in multiplayer, though I have absolutely no intention of trying to find out.)

[I think the captcha software is not getting along with me at the moment; apologies if this double posts.]

Ajax1905/04/2013

I got stuck very early on Limbo. Very early… floating box in a small pond. If I recall, Ajax was present and I believe he might have sworn off Limbo forever on account of that scene.

Yes, I was there. We tried to get past that box in the pond for like 30 minutes. We kept handing the controller back and forth trying everything we could think of, but it was constant failure.

I love the way Limbo looks. It’s gorgeous. I was a fan long before it came out.

Despite how beautiful it was, the game had absolutely no appeal. Not fun. Too frustrating. And I am not that big a fan of platformers. Limbo is the Jessica Alba of video games: Very pretty, but utterly dull.

matt w05/04/2013

I realize that my last comment was much rantier than I intended. What I was trying to say was that, I don’t think that looking at indie games or arty games or whatever tells us anything here, because a lot of those games are still plenty “gamey” in whatever sense you want. There’s another set of games, or notgames as they call them, which aren’t “gamey” in that sense, and yet I think they can still be perfectly valid. I also think there isn’t a good reason not to call them games, but that’s an endless rabbit hole.

I liked LIMBO but it’s very much a puzzle platformer — my least favorite parts are the bit where you have to exactly calibrate a jump or something to time them exactly with whatever bit of physics that they’re using. (There was one part early on involving jumping off a log while running away from the spider that aggravated me considerable.) It’s slow enough that replaying bits of it get annoying, and some of these get more frequent toward the end. But I thought it did a good job of making its puzzles part of a pretty juicy physics system (I mean, things like the weight of objects interact in interesting ways).

It’s very try-and-die, though; Kieron Gillen hated it for that.

SPOILER FOR THE FLOATING BOX

You’re not supposed to float the box across the pond. You’d just passed a rope that you couldn’t reach. Drag the box back to the rope and jump up onto it to climb up into the trees.

Sorry about the Capthcha problem Matt, you’re not the first. We’re going to go back to a more reliable system shortly!

Mike "Scout" Gust05/04/2013

That looks like not fun. So I’d say that Tale of Tales has achieved their mission once again, which was to get you to give them your money and then be sorry you did. Sort of like buying a Papa John’s frozen pizza except more expensive and not as filling.

I’ve probably rage quit more games than not in the last few years so I guess I would commend Tale of Tales for doing away with the clutter and the unavoidable heartbreak that comes from starting a new game and cutting right to the hating and heartbreak.

I do want to try on Esther for size though.

Seriously, I do get that Tale of Tales are playing with the idea of the gamer being annoyed in a game. All kinds of stuff annoys me in all kinds of games but I can get a kind of demented kick out of it if I suspect that the devs weren’t trying to be annoying. But purposely supplying annoying stuff to insure that I’m going to be annoyed somehow seems like a case of “doing it wrong”. I will say I liked The Path cause it had enough content to let me amuse myself with the possibilities. Plus, I sort of made up my own ending and stopped playing at just the right moment, something I learned from Daggerfall. But the joke is getting old, no?

Great video, Zeke.

EmCeeKhan05/04/2013

I love Zeke’s videos because I can never seem to get one done to put on IronManMode. This is a great review.

matt w05/05/2013

To tell the truth the only reason I added that complaint about the captcha system was that the captcha system wouldn’t let me try to post again unless I added something.